


Knowing

by themantlingdark



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-09-13 20:47:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16899600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themantlingdark/pseuds/themantlingdark
Summary: Thor is a painter. Loki is an actor. Professional success proves privately disappointing. The brothers vent their frustrations about their occupations and find that satisfaction was within reach all along.





	Knowing

 

 

1.

 

The gallery’s oak parquet floor cast an amber glow up onto Thor’s paintings. It made him wish he’d put a thin yellow glaze over them himself. The reflection gave the works a hint of golden hour cinematography, which then made him think about working in wider formats to reference films. He wondered if 2.35: 1 would be too wide. If the paintings would begin to feel like murals or wallpaper. Width had never been as important to him as height in his work. The paintings were essentially landscapes in which the sky tended to dominate. They looked at once like smoke left over from fireworks and like the glowing pillars of dust in distant nebulae. Sometimes the sea made an appearance, wet with poured and dripped paint, seeming to glow as waves do when they have the sun behind them. Inviting and deadly. The source of life and, by extension, death. Thor’s works were never less than six feet tall and were often more than ten. They forced the viewer to look up and made them feel small. He always proportioned them like portraits to reference figures and portals and he wondered how he’d feel about losing those associations. He wouldn’t know until he tried.

 

People were trickling in now, stylishly dressed and fashionably late. They would talk to their companions first, always shy when the rooms were largely empty, but as more people filtered in and the wine began to hit them, some of the visitors would flutter over to talk with Thor. For now they were still making their way to the caterers, so he had a few more minutes in which to weigh the merits of subtle glazes on future paintings. Maybe more orange than yellow. A green glaze might be worth trying too. To make the sky look a little nauseated and hint at the way the colors of the summer landscape were sometimes mirrored by the clouds.

 

Thor was debating the best transparent pigments when Mike Hollis, who had purchased several of Thor’s pieces already, came striding up to stop Thor’s thoughts.

“Thor, good to see you. How’ve you been?”

“Fine, thanks. You?” Thor smiled, switching his drink to his left hand so that he could shake Mike’s with his right.

“Great, great,” Mike nodded, and half-turned away to gesture at the paintings. “These,” he said, pointing to two pieces hanging on opposite walls, “and the one at the far end of the next room.”

Thor was surprised. Those three paintings had come one after the other. They were, essentially, different views of the same imaginary setting. All the canvases were the same size. Thor had wanted to keep them together but his dealer hadn’t wanted to reduce three separate sales--and potential relationships with buyers--to one sale. Thor decided to put up a bigger fight in the future.

“They’re the perfect size and colors for my living room,” Mike continued, oblivious to the amusement in Thor’s eyes. “I want them all. Where’s Antonio?”

 

After that, Thor smiled his way through conversations that weren’t so much conversations as monologues. He overheard a buyer asking her friend if she liked the blue one or the green one and the friend recommended the blue one as the one she already had was fairly similar and the green would just look like a bad match.

 

The green one was, in Thor’s estimation, the best of the bunch.

 

He turned so that he could watch the street through the floor-to-ceiling window. The gallery could be a bit intimidating and the opening was invitation only, but sometimes someone would stop and stare in through the glass and Thor would go out and show them in and spend time chatting with them.

 

When there were little red dots next to all the pieces, the subject of conversation turned to when Thor expected to have more paintings done and the hope that they would look largely like the ones already on the walls. The words “When am I going to get mine?” were uttered more than once.

 

Two hours in, Thor felt his phone buzzing against his thigh. After politely extricating himself from a conversation that ultimately had nothing to do with him, he slipped back into Antonio’s office and dialed the missed call.

“Hey,” Loki answered, sounding chipper, but slightly breathless and somehow a bit rattled. There were at least a dozen voices in the background. “Hang on a sec. Let me get back to a dressing room.”

Thor heard voices briefly rising, then falling away below the hollow knock of hard-soled shoes on a wooden floor.

“Sorry,” Loki panted, and Thor heard the click of a lock as Loki’s surroundings went silent. “I’m probably not going to be able to make it. Stage door was a little nuts and now the director wants us all to go out as a group.”

“That’s all right. You’re not missing anything here.”

“Bad?” Loki asked.

“Oh, the openings stopped being fun right around the same time the paintings started selling.”

“I can blow this off and come bail you out of there with some family emergency excuse if you want,” Loki offered, and Thor laughed quietly into the phone, tucking his head down toward his chest to muffle the sound, knowing well how thin the walls of the office were.

“I’ll take a raincheck,” Thor said. “Sorry I missed your last performance.”

“I think it’s all gone stale at this point anyway,” Loki sighed. “And you made it to opening night and saw the other three plays I’m not even in. You don’t have anything to be sorry about. I’m the one who’s missing your only opening.”

“Well, count your blessings,” Thor smiled. “You’ve seen all the paintings anyway.”

“I know,” Loki murmured. “But it’s always nice to see them together in a clean room before they all go off to undeserving homes. And I like to piss off Antonio by monopolizing your attention all night.”

Thor snorted and rocked himself gently from side to side where he was leaning against the wall.

“I do appreciate that,” Thor laughed, and Loki hummed a fond, wistful sound into the phone.

“Are you staying in town tonight, or heading back upstate as fast as you can?” Loki asked.

“Staying.”

“Want to rescue me from the afterparty then?”

“Think you’ll need it?”

“It hasn’t even started yet and I need it,” Loki groaned.

“All right,” Thor said. “I’ll call you when I’m done here.”

“Excellent. Talk to you in a bit.”

 

Thor took a few slow breaths, cracked his knuckles, his back, and his neck, and wove himself back into the crowd of warm bodies, wine-blushed cheeks, and questions about whether he could maybe paint something that would go nicely with the rugs.

  
  


By the time Thor caught up with them, Loki’s company had found and overtaken a dive that was serving two dollar PBRs. Thor could see the back of his brother’s head peeking up over the edge of a booth at the far end of the room. The sweaty, fermented haze of the bar made Loki’s hair look grey from a distance. Thor had to resist the useless urge to rub his eyes and the equally useless temptation to check the soles of his shoes, which continually stuck to the linoleum and peeled off again as he picked his way between tables.

“All the flower shops were closed for the night, so you’ll have to settle for candy,” Thor said, setting a chocolate bar on the tabletop and dropping down to perch on the few inches of bench that were free at Loki’s right hip.

“Candy is never settling,” Loki smiled, and scooted over to let Thor take a proper seat beside him.

Thor could see the remnants of stage makeup around his brother’s eyes, brightening the green with greasy black smears that settled into the fine lines in his skin. Loki made introductions and Thor shook a dozen hands and heard as many elaborate compliments paid to Loki’s performance and to his keen perception.

 

The sun had set hours ago, but the city was still sweltering and sticky. Inside the bar, the warmth of dozens of bodies and thousands of exhaled breaths was inching the temperature past eighty despite the air conditioning. Sweat darkened the backs of everyone’s shirts at the shoulder blades and the waist. It flattened their hair to their foreheads and left them all smelling like onions and the sea.

There was a small stack of sealed, greeting-card-shaped envelopes lying under Loki’s phone on the tabletop in front of him. When Loki saw Thor eyeing them, he inclined his head toward them.

“Read ’em and weep,” he said under his breath, his eyes droll and his mouth bitter.

Thor raised an eyebrow at this but Loki’s head gave an urging, encouraging dip. So Thor took the papers and opened them with the tiny pocketknife Loki had given him as a stocking stuffer when they were still in their teens. Learning that Thor still had the gift--and, even better, that he carried it with him everyday and used it often, for its handle was worn smooth at what were once crisp edges--almost made the contents of the envelopes worthwhile.

 

Thor had expected the cards to be farewells from the rest of the cast. Instead, they were notes from fans at the stage door. Phone numbers-- _ text me xoxo _ . Demands for more shows, as though that was under Loki’s control. Requests for candid photos. Inquiries about whether there would ever be sequels to their favorites of Loki’s films. Requests for his own phone number, email, and home address. Little Instax photos--always two, with the face and body focused on separately. There were a few notes that politely said “your performances really speak to me,” but none of them repeated what, exactly, Loki’s performances had said. There were also a few messages so lewd Thor would’ve have felt wrong handing them to someone he’d been sleeping with for months. He couldn’t fathom saying them to a total stranger.

 

Thor found his brother’s gaze waiting for his own when he looked up from his reading. He gaped and gave a faint, disbelieving shake of his head. Loki flashed a thin, grateful smile.

 

Despite the cold beer and the chocolate bar, Loki’s features were slackening and his eyelids were drooping. His breaths came like those of someone in deep sleep, making his belly rise and fall more than his breast. The way his shoulders curved in reminded Thor of osteoporosis.

“We should get you out of this heat,” Thor said, loudly enough that the rest of the company could hear it and, therefore, could not argue with Loki’s departure. Loki rallied a bit to say his goodnights and goodbyes, relieved that Thor had so quickly and easily found him an out.

 

“Where would you like to go?” Thor asked, as they stepped out onto crumpled cigarette butts beneath the dingy light of a weak incandescent bulb. The air smelled like an ashtray and wasn’t any cooler than it had been in the bar, but at least it was moving and they weren’t butted up against sweating bodies.

“Your hotel will have better AC than my place,” Loki decided.

“And a bottle of champagne in the mini fridge.”

“Nice,” Loki purred. He gave Thor a lazy grin as they waited at the red hand of a crosswalk.

While they walked, Thor untucked his shirt and started undoing the lower buttons, then tied the loose halves of fabric together above his navel. Loki laughed but immediately did the same and sighed in relief as the breeze hit his skin.

 

Thor watched the eyes of strangers as they caught sight of his brother. Always a subtle double-take, uncertain at first if it was the face they’d seen on televisions and movie screens. On realizing it was indeed the face they knew, people had one of two reactions: a request for a photo, sometimes with the additional condition that it be taken by Thor; or the deliberate smoothing of their features and lowering of their eyebrows, projecting an indifference they didn’t entirely feel.

 

Loki spied on passersby as well. If strangers caught sight of his brother first, Loki became invisible beside him. He’d hated it when he was younger, but now it felt like a magic trick, and he often aimed his forehead at his feet so that the only face available to strangers was one that would haunt their thoughts for years to come. Loki felt generous for it. He’d done countless people the favor of directing their attention to what was truly worth remembering.

 

They stopped at a liquor store that featured the obligatory battered, once-white linoleum floors and the ancient Good Humor novelty freezer humming loudly by the cash register. After a minute spent peering through its frosty glass top and debating the merits of its contents, they settled on a strawberry swirl cone and a Klondike bar.

 

The weather meant there could be no balance struck with their treats. If they ate the ice cream as quickly as it was melting, they’d get punishing headaches, but if they ate slowly, there would be a melting, dribbling mess. They settled for the latter and for looking ridiculous, eating at a comfortable pace while leaning forward like storks to keep the rapidly liquefying desserts from dripping onto their clothes.  

 

They were still licking their fingers clean as they pushed into the welcome chill of the hotel lobby.

“Any time off in sight?” Thor asked, as they leaned back against the cold steel railing of the elevator and stared up at the ascending red numbers on the screen.

“Not until autumn,” Loki said quietly, closing his eyes as he spoke. Thor couldn’t tell if it was merely the ever-flickering light from the fluorescent bulbs or if his brother’s lips nostrils had quivered faintly. “I agreed to another show almost a year ago. Now I’m stuck in it for the next three months.”

“Damn,” Thor sympathized.

He saw Loki’s pale face, uniformly white from top to bottom. He should have had freckles across his nose, cheeks, and forehead by now. The longest day of the year had passed and the sun was slyly waning.

“You’ve been staying in a lot,” Thor said, and Loki nodded.

“I get no end of interruptions if I go out now. Can’t finish a thought. Can’t read in a park. Can’t have a bite of something warm before it gets cold, or cold before it gets warm. Pictures. Autographs. Prying questions--prying  _ hands _ .”

 

Up in Thor’s room they stripped down to their boxers and stood in front of the air conditioner, sipping cold champagne from disposable plastic cups and slowly spinning in place to cool themselves, pulling their hair up off their necks and letting their napes breathe.

 

Thor freshened their drinks while Loki turned down the bed. They sighed as they stretched out on the dry white sheets with their heads propped up by half a dozen overstuffed pillows. The relative quiet of the room was pleasant. It hummed with the soothing white noise of electricity, which was a welcome departure from the hours of chatter that had preceded it.

 

The brothers felt the tightness in their backs slowly relaxing, freed from the compression wrought on their spines all day by hardwood floors and gravity. The release of tension there seemed to trigger a matching release in their minds, which flowed back out into their bodies. The outer corners of their lips curled upward almost imperceptibly and the skin that had folded up between their eyebrows began to lie flat again.

“Any luck?” Loki asked.

“I should probably give up on gallery openings,” Thor sighed.

“You say that literally every time.”

“I know,” Thor laughed. “I keep hoping they’ll get better.”

“Ah, hope,” Loki nodded. “The mother of all disappointment.”

Thor gave a low, bouncing giggle and drained his glass. Loki could feel his brother’s laughter against every inch of his skin, buzzing down through the muscles to knock on his bones. It made him hate the tinny cage of the cell phone speaker and the way it reduced the richness of Thor’s voice to a flat rasp that was swallowed up and snuffed out by the shell of his ear.

“Anything entertaining?” Loki tried.

Thor took a deep breath and, when he spoke, his voice was pure asshole.

“‘Hey, so could you just paint another peach one to go with the one I’ve already got? Cuz, like, there’s a space on the other end of the wall where it would fit perfectly, and there’d be a door between them and I remember you talking about doorways once. So, like, one painting on each side, and then that way it would be balanced--I know you talk about balance a lot. Oh, and could you make it, like, the same, but backward? You know? Mirrored? So it would be symmetrical?’”

Loki had his eyes closed and was grinning at the ceiling as his body shook the bed with laughter.

“What did you say?” Loki panted.

“I told her I was in a grey phase at the moment.”

“You emo fuck.”

“It’s true,” Thor defended, laughing anyway. “I’ve got eight grey nightmares underway in the studio right now. It looks like tornado alley.”

“I like the sound of that,” Loki smiled.

“The best--or probably worst--part is that  _ that _ conversation was the closest anyone came to talking about the paintings all night. I do love doorways and balance.”

“Credit where credit’s due,” Loki granted, then tipped back the last of his champagne.

“And I actually love the piece she bought and I  _ do _ want to paint a bunch of peachy pink ones, but she completely-”

“Missed that the compositions of your paintings are, in part, determined by the chaos of a liquid medium and your deliberate reduction of control when it comes to the paint’s application? Not to mention the fact that they’re not about her getting what she wants and decorating her fucking apartment?”

“Yeah, that,” Thor laughed.

Loki saw tears leaking down the side of his brother’s face and catching in the wispy hair that hung down from his temples. Just the combination of laughter and gravity, but the source of the humor was a sort of heartbreak, or should have been. Thor didn’t seem as bothered by it as Loki was.

“Anyway, how about you?” Thor asked. “Bang or whimper?”

“It’s always a whimper, from open to close,” Loki said. “All the interesting stuff happens in rehearsals. Shop talk is the best part. All the argument, input, and interpretation. The passion and interaction. The run itself is like miming for a wall of silence. Being in a vacuum. There’s applause, I know, but that’s basically a given as long as you don’t completely fuck things up. There’s no precision in clapping hands. What was it he wrote?  _ ‘I am haunted by the feeling that she is saying melting lords of death, avalanches, rivers and moments of passing through _ -’”

“ _ And I am replying, ‘Yes, yes. Shoes and pudding,’ _ ” Thor finished, giggling again and lightly fiddling with the bones of Loki’s right wrist. “I love him for narrowing it down to shoes and pudding.”

“Same,” Loki smiled. “It’s like stepping in shit.”

Thor nodded, grinning. He fluttered his fingers to ask for Loki’s empty glass, then nested it within his own and and leaned over to set them on the nightstand.

“Anything good at the stage door, or was it all like the cards?” Thor asked.

“Like the cards. Just strangers who want to fuck whoever it is they think I am. And if I’m horny enough to go home with them there’s always this weird pretending: ‘Sorry about the mess. My apartment isn’t usually like this.’ Of course it is. Mine is. Everyone’s is. And then comes the Instagram-selfie version of sex, which is all porn-poses and sucked-in stomachs,” Loki murmured, then shook his head to clear it. “It feels impossible. Everyone’s always screaming ‘see me!’ And when I say ‘okay, I’ll try’ and lean in for a closer look, they clam up and slam shut. When I ask them about themselves the answer is always, ‘Oh, I don’t want to bore you with my life story,’ and I want to say ‘I hate to break it to you, honey, but that’s all we’ve got.’”

“They just want some glamour and a little break from reality,” Thor diagnosed.

“Right, which is fair, and it’s fine for them. But I play make-believe for a living. I don’t want to do it in my free time.”

“They won’t let you out of your costume.”

“Nope. I’m invisible and mute. Playing call and response, only-”

“There’s no response,” Thor guessed, with a half-grin that said sympathy.

“Exactly,” Loki sighed. “I feel like a peacock displaying at a mirror.”

“Well, for what it’s worth, I see you,” Thor said, and nudged him.

Loki hummed through a smile and knocked Thor’s elbow with his own.

 

They agreed that they should get up and brush their teeth after all the sugar in the champagne and ice cream, but neither brother managed to go through with the decision. Their limbs were arranged too comfortably, and the blankets and room were at just the right temperature. Upsetting this simple harmony of perfections any sooner than they absolutely had to felt unconscionable to each of them.  

  
  


2.

 

Thor’s alarm went off at ten in the morning. Loki convinced him that they should sleep for another hour-and-a-half and then grab bagels on their way to his apartment, where they would shower and resume their tired, grumbling version of celebrating.

 

Loki’s ancient, overworked air conditioner had been buzzing away all night in his absence and had succeeded in lowering the temperature of his rooms to almost livable levels. Not wanting to undo its efforts, the brothers took quick, cold showers.

 

Loki’s publicist had been after him to move somewhere bigger, newer, and brighter for years. “You’ve made piles of money from films,” he’d said. Loki had replied that it was all going into his “old and ugly” fund. His publicist’s response had been “What the hell are you talking about?” and Loki had sung the entirety of  _ Young and Beautiful _ to him--or, more accurately,  _ at _ him--in the car.

 

Thor came out of the bathroom and found the bed empty, so he dripped his way to the kitchen where Loki was standing at the counter, carefully rolling a joint, wearing a few lingering drops of water and a towel around his waist.

“Sorry,” Loki murmured, then frowned and licked the paper. “I thought I had more.” He sealed the cigarette and handed it to Thor. “I hate passing, just shotgun me. Your fingers can take the heat. I always need a clip less than halfway through.”

Thor lit it and took a long pull, then leaned in and let the smoke out as a thin white jet that neatly disappeared into the waiting O of Loki’s lips.

“Did I tell you I’ve been growing it?” Thor asked.

“Nice,” Loki said, and the word left his mouth as white mist. “Tricky?”

“Not really.”

“If I had the light,” Loki lamented. “My basil plant was not long for this world.”

The air conditioner took up one of two equally tiny, south-facing windows and the necessity of curtains cut into what little light the other one was able to provide.

 

Thor smiled and sucked smoke into his mouth, but no further, then shot the potent little cloud over to his brother, who caught it like a trap.

Loki held it in and waited. His lungs were warm with smoke and they were paused at a point in their expansion that wasn’t what they were accustomed to. Apart from the high, Loki’s favorite part of smoking was the way it revealed the hidden inner contours of his body by making them burn. He enjoyed the way the unconscious, involuntary act of breathing became measured and deliberate and subject to his will. The way it came to the foreground and acquired a second purpose.

 

After Loki exhaled, Thor sucked in another hit and puffed it across the inch between their lips. Loki’s lungs expanded again by an increment equivalent to the inside of his brother’s mouth. After three more of the same, Loki had a comfortable lungful. He held it all in until he felt he might float away, then let it rush out as a groaning sigh that was greeted by laughter from his brother.

 

Thor’s next hit was slow and deep and his chest rose up over the fullness of his lungs. He held it for three beats, smiled with the left corner of his mouth, and tilted his head to the right. Loki followed suit. He felt the dry outer edges of Thor’s lips and the smooth wet skin within, then the flood of heat and pressure as Thor breathed into him. Thor’s lungs were bigger than Loki’s so there was a small spill of smoke left over. It dissolved between them as they leaned back, revealing the shiny thread of spit that hung between their lips.

 

From a chemical perspective, it hadn’t been a particularly productive hit for Loki: Thor’s lungs absorbed most of the meaningful compounds. It made Loki think of bongs. He hated them though. They filtered out the bulk of the THC, so you might as well have saved yourself the money and toked actual grass. And, yes, bongs cooled the smoke, but if you wanted to inhale something smooth and cool that wouldn’t get you high any time soon, there was plenty of fresh air around for that.

 

From a different--though ultimately equally chemical, Loki supposed--perspective, it had been the best hit yet. Like being kids again, breathing back and forth at the bottom of their grandparents’ swimming pool, trying to stay underwater forever like the mermaids they’d seen at Weeki Wachee. The years apart and the rest of the world had been stripped away until a hazy room nine stories up became the summer when they were four and five.

 

Thor turned his hand around to offer the cigarette to his brother’s lips. Loki breathed in slowly to let the warm pressure of Thor’s fingers linger against his mouth. He urged his lungs to expand until he thought his ribs might unmoor. Thor’s mouth was waiting, not with impatience, but with something like urgency. Thor had pulled back purely out of necessity, to offer the joint, and stayed away only as long as his hand was in his path. As soon as it was clear, his face swung in and his mouth sealed over Loki’s and their breaths were swapped again.

 

Thor’s mouth didn’t move away afterward, it merely moved. Closed without backing off, leaving his lips full and flush with his brother’s. After a soft nip, Thor turned his head so that his cheek rolled against Loki’s cheek. He shot the spent smoke out the far corner of his mouth to spare their eyes the sting, then took another pull on the dwindling joint, turned back until their mouths met, and felt the pull as Loki breathed in a split second before he began to breathe out.

 

Loki left his mouth open against Thor’s and let the smoke flow out through his nose as he stared at his brother.

 

Thor seemed the same, yet different. Old and new. Beginning and finished. Calm and excited. Self-contained and, therefore, somehow, boundless.

 

Loki’s thoughts ran in circles trying to catch him.

 

“Your hand,” Loki gasped, remembering how short the cigarette had been the last time he’d seen it.

 

He guided Thor’s arm to an ashtray to drop the butt and then to the sink where he ran his brother’s fingers under cold water while he watched the unwavering amusement and comfort that curved smoothly across Thor’s face.

 

Peter O’Toole’s voice floated up in Loki’s head:  _ The trick, William Potter, is not  _ minding _ that it hurts. _

A Thor who no longer minded.

A Thor who was through with being bothered. Through with bounds.

A Thor who was purely Thor.

It would almost be as if there were more of him.

The dragon part of Loki’s heart that hoarded everything it could of his brother uncoiled in his breast.  

 

He turned off the sink, slid his arm around Thor’s neck, and tugged him in closer. He watched the smile on Thor’s lips spread until it split open before it disappeared beneath his nose. And then he could feel it, tight against his own open grin. They had to wait a moment for their euphoria to settle so that their mouths could soften enough to seal together. Loki breathed in until Thor breathed out and filled his breast with air that was as warm as everything else inside Thor. They passed the same air back again and laughed at the sound, so much like blowing up a balloon. It left them giddy in ways that had nothing to do with weed's euphoria or with the minor disruption to their oxygen intake. They swayed together in the tiny kitchen, gripping the towels that were slung low on their hips and smelling the wet hair and soaped skin that were quickly overcoming the fug.

“We’re lucky we didn’t do that one time too many and pass out in Grandma’s pool,” Thor murmured, and Loki could see the mermaids swimming through his brother’s mind.

“I know,” Loki nodded. “We should have had the sense to breathe through a hose like the girls in the show.”

“Sitting in their laps and getting my picture taken was probably the height of romance for me,” Thor confessed, and Loki laughed into his neck, nodding and letting his lips catch on Thor’s skin as damp blond hair brushed his nose.

“I was so in love I could barely look at them,” Loki admitted, blushing afresh thirty years later.

“Mmm,” Thor nodded. “I wanted to be one when I grew up.”

“Is that why you got a place with a pool?”

“God, probably,” Thor said, puffing tiny laughs out his nose and onto Loki’s shoulder. “Never thought about it. I liked the property and the pole barn.”

Loki pictured the hills that rolled from blue to green as they neared you from every direction at Thor’s home. It was half a mile to the nearest house, which was tucked discreetly behind a dense old wood that granted each of its neighbors privacy.

“Is it hard to be all alone up there?”

“No, it’s what I expect,” Thor said. “Is the city what you expected?”

“No. But the problem isn’t just the city, it’s the celebrity. Millions of people looking at me without really seeing.”

“Creepy.”

“Yeah,” Loki huffed. “At some point it all crossed a threshold. The proportions got too distorted. I stayed the same size but everything around me got so big. I feel like I can’t reach the edges. Like I’m an ant in the Empire State Building.”

“Invisible. And trapped.”

Loki nodded and kissed the side of Thor’s neck, then tugged the towels loose from their waists and he ambled off to the bathroom to hang them up to dry. He heard the kitchen cupboards opening and closing behind him and the faucet running twice. When he got back he took the offered glass from Thor and they stood, alternately sipping and gulping, sometimes sloshing water over the rims of their cups and sending it down their cheeks and onto their chests.

 

Loki couldn’t resist a light smack to Thor’s butt as he herded him out of the kitchen. The flesh jiggled pleasantly and made that soft brushing slapping sound that only skin can manage.

“Don’t bother,” Loki said, when Thor reached for his bag.

“Okay, but don’t come crying to me when your bed’s full of pubes that are visibly not yours,” Thor said, and tossed himself onto the mattress with a gleeful bounce and a sated groan.

He rolled to the far side, settled face down, and hummed as the cold air poured down across his back. Loki stretched out on his side to put as little of his body in contact with the bed as possible, maximizing airflow.  

“Good call putting the bed under the AC,” Thor’s words were muffled by the mattress and the appliance, but Loki made them out easily from less than a foot away.

“It’s the only way this place is livable.”

“Don’t let me keep you cooped up in here on your day off,” Thor said, turning onto his right side to face his brother. “We can go out and do whatever you want.”

“No we can’t. Every two blocks we’d get stopped by some stranger. It would eat up all our time,” Loki murmured, shaking his head. “I’d rather stay in and do nothing. I hardly ever get the chance.”

“Okay,” Thor smiled, then lifted his left hand and flexed his fingers into claws. “Turn around. I’ll do your back.”

Loki couldn’t flip his body fast enough. Thor would scratch his back through his clothes on the all-too-rare occasions when they were together anymore, but it wasn’t the same as the days when they were kids and they’d lie in bed half-naked to do it like this.

“It’s been over twenty years,” Loki realized, and felt a long breath leave Thor’s nose. It tickled the fine hair on the back of his neck and gave him goosebumps where the air conditioner hadn’t managed to do so.

“I know,” Thor said softly. “Doesn’t seem possible, does it? We were, what, eleven and twelve the last time?”

“Yeah. Before sex ed came along and ruined everything.”

“To be fair, ‘I was just scratching his back’ would have sounded pretty thin.”

“True,” Loki giggled, then sighed. “But I felt guilty about things I hadn’t even thought of. I just wanted my back scratched until I fell asleep.”

“Do you want to fall asleep now?”

“No, don’t let me. I don’t want to miss your visit.”

“’Kay,” Thor said, and kept scratching until he heard the exhaled breaths catching against the insides of Loki’s lips, inflating them slightly before limply whistling through.

“Are you sleeping?” Thor asked gently.

“Mmm,” Loki said.

“Sounds like a yes,” Thor smiled, and Loki whined and stretched and rolled onto his back.

“What about you?”

“What  _ about _ me?”

“What did  _ you _ want?” Loki asked. His eyes were dark and glassy. The whites had gone red with sleep and the pupils were wide in the room’s low light. “I never asked. I just showed up to get my back scratched.”

“I liked scratching your back. And having you in my bed. Sleeping next to you. I’ve always hated sleeping alone. And if it was cold, you’d snuggle me. That was my favorite thing.”

“I can-” Loki began, but Thor was already shaking his head.

“It’s too hot, you’d melt,” Thor soothed, and urged Loki to turn around again so that he could resume the back-scratching.

Somehow the scratching always seemed to incite an itch, which would then be scratched, at which point a new prickle would pop up elsewhere only to be defeated by the drag of Thor’s nails. If there was a ceiling to it, Loki had never lasted long enough to collide with it. Instead, he would get caught in the longest stretch of pleasure life had thus far proven itself capable of providing.

“Come see me in October,” Thor said, scratching the satiny skin above the sacrum and feeling the way Loki’s back arched to better offer it up. “If you’re free,” Thor added. “We can sleep on the sofa. Have bonfires. Do shitty exquisite corpse drawings. Drink Irish hot chocolate and eat too much cheese.”

Loki hummed and wiggled, his whole body wagging like a tail. Thor saw the black curls in front of his face shifting up and down as his brother nodded.

 

When their empty bellies grumbled they got up to snack on the fruit salad that took up most of the top shelf of the fridge. They stood at the counter, popping watermelon and strawberries into their mouths with their fingers until their bellies complained of being full.

 

For a while they pulled the curtain aside and spied out the window to see the city at its most Fairfield Porter--in glowing pinks, blues, and yellows, all softened with subtle greys.

“Draw my face,” Loki said, seeing the same colors coming in through the window and painting his brother’s bare skin. Thor smiled and reached with his fingertip to trace the shadows cast on Loki’s face. The light was always different, so the drawing was never the same twice, but it reliably tickled and soothed, and when Thor was finished he always returned to the tip of Loki’s nose to gently prod at the mismatched pieces of cartilage that asymmetrically shaped its tip.

 

This was older than the back-scratching. As old as breathing back and forth like mermaids. It’s what taught Thor how to draw. What showed him that what your hands felt was not what your eyes saw; light was what built faces. And Thor wondered about watercolors again. He always worked in acrylic, but whenever he looked at Loki’s lips, with their deep berry pink that seemed to bleed out and stain a mouth onto his skin, he thought he should paint a portrait in watercolors to make a proper record of his brother. It was what botanical artists always used. Apart from convention, Thor had never seen an argument as to  _ why _ they employed that medium--it was fragile and mistakes were often impossible to undo. But now the staining tendencies of fruits and body fluids occurred to him and the staining nature of watercolor paints seemed to be their sister.

 

When they were stretched out in bed again, Loki asked for another portrait. The sunset and the distance from the window meant that his face was mostly dark and only the features themselves stood out. Thor petted his way along the hairs of the brows and eyelashes in tiny feather-strokes that progressed as slowly and thoroughly as a caterpillar’s feet. It was like being groomed. Loki felt small and animal and wholly comfortable in his den. A member of some undiscovered species composed only of he and Thor. Endangered, he supposed, with numbers so low. Soon to vanish, and with no one the wiser. That was the heart of it: no one was wise. He and Thor were invisible behind the things they made. How anyone could be such a fool that they looked straight at Thor and failed to see him was beyond even Loki’s wild imagination.

 

Their loss, Loki supposed.

 

“Did you already buy your ticket back?” Loki asked.

“No, I didn’t know when I’d be going, so I held off.”

“Can you stay until tomorrow then?”

“You sure I won’t be in the way?”

“Yes, stay,” Loki insisted. “My meeting isn’t until one. We can eat more bagels.”

“Keep feeding me bagels and you’ll never get rid of me.”

“Good. Come here,” Loki said urging Thor forward with little fluttering taps of his fingertips against the back of his brother’s arm.

“You’ll get too warm,” Thor reminded.

“Then I’ll take another shower. C’me’re.”

Loki nudged Thor with his palm and hooked the back of Thor’s knee with his heel, dragging it forward and catching Thor’s thigh between his own legs, then lifting his head to let Thor’s left arm slide beneath his neck.

“Like this?” Loki asked, and Thor nodded and reached behind Loki with his right arm, first to haul him in a little closer and then to scratch his back. Loki made a low, airy hum of approval.

 

After Loki’s eyes closed, Thor listened to Loki’s breathing and gauged the tension in his back with his fingertips. Whenever the breaths slowed and the muscles went slack, Thor would wake his brother up with a kiss. Most often a peck on the nose, which was closest. But sometimes a smacking pucker on the cheek. Or a pinching nip to the upper or lower lip. And sometimes a soft, warm pressure that was spread out evenly across Loki’s mouth.

 

Each time Loki woke like that he told himself he should put more effort into remaining awake. He worried Thor might think he was feigning sleep to win himself more kisses. But then his sleepy mind remembered that Thor could have opted for any other method of waking him--shaking his shoulder, pinching him, or calling his name--and his worries floated out as a few puffs of laughter. The sense of relief meant that Loki fell asleep even more frequently.

 

At eight Thor called in a carry out order for sushi and left with his copy of Loki’s keys to go get it. While he was out, Loki went into the bathroom and splashed cool water onto his face and throat to perk himself up. His body was still swimming in the dizzy heat brought on by sleep and he feared that if he didn’t climb out now he’d drown in it and wake to find his brother gone and his alarm blaring at him to go to work. He let the sink run icy against the insides of elbows and wrists to chill his blood a bit, tightening him and reeling him back in from where his brother’s hands and mouth had unspooled him.

 

When he turned to leave, the two bath towels greeted him from their hooks on the back of the door, still slightly damp from the showers he and Thor had taken at noon. He leaned close and breathed in. The terry cloth on the right smelled so like his brother it was a shock. It seemed strange that, fresh from a scrub with soap and water, the scent of Thor’s skin was strong enough to overwhelm all the perfumes and cling to the cotton. Stranger still how much of it was the same, unchanged from when they were children. It was like seeing a ghost. The babies, boys, youths and even young men that the brothers had been were dead now. They’d been reborn into new, older bodies each morning and had died again every night, and would do so until their luck ran out. But something within somehow remained, remembering mermaids and chicken pox and the white cat that belonged to the neighbors. And something without had survived as well, smelling the same and looking similar enough that there was no mistaking it. Hardly immortal, but not as hopelessly doomed as the shape of an infant or a boy. The grain of sand at the pearl’s center and the trellis that held up wave after wave of roses. These things would exist for eight decades, perhaps, and if Loki lived that long too, he might be the only one who knew that the face and scent had survived all that time.

 

The two cups they’d been drinking from earlier were still side by side on the counter near the kitchen sink. Loki held them up beneath the yellow kitchen ceiling light to see the cloudy prints left by lips and fingers, the larger ones so obviously his brother’s he laughed out loud. They’d be washed away soon, but not soon replaced. Loki was trapped here through September. He wondered how quickly his brother could come back. It wasn’t that they lived terribly far apart, just that it was far enough that to come for only one day meant a large proportion of the time was spent in travel. Better if he could come for several days, to space out the hours in cars and trains. Thor’s schedule was generally self-determined and, therefore, flexible when he wanted it to be. Loki wasn’t sure of his own yet. Performances, when they began, would likely be clustered from Tuesday through Sunday, with two shows per day on the weekends. The rehearsals leading up to them would likely be even more relentless. He wished he could run back in time and slap a hand over his own mouth to stop another “yes” from flying out of it, knowing now that it would subject him to a thousand things that made him want to scream “no.”

 

Thor returned with dinner and a cold six-pack of Asahi. They sat sipping beer and softly munching plum rolls while the sides of their knees knocked together beneath the table.

 

Loki caught himself seeing things he knew he would forget even while he told himself to remember them. The creases on the backs of his brother’s knuckles, redder and deeper than his own. The veins on the back of Thor’s hand and wrist, full with the warmth of the room and the alcohol.

“Has there ever been a good letter?” Thor asked, and Loki lost his count of the hairs on the back of Thor’s hand. He had to think for a second about what the question meant.

“There was one,” Loki nodded. “He could read me between the lines. Must have seen the show twice and written the note in between. Caught every look, blink, and breath I threw. Every reference.”

“Contact,” Thor said.

“Exactly. Conversation confirmed. It was the only time I stopped feeling like a cut of meat treading the boards.”

“Have you kept up with him?”

“No return address, email, or phone number,” Loki said, shaking his head. “Only signed with his initials. I still look for his face, but for all I know he came in from Tennessee.”

“Shit,” Thor breathed. “Sorry.”

They drained their beers. Thor got up to rinse the bottles, then grabbed two more from the fridge and  popped them open with the pocket knife.

 

That letter had been the first pleasant surprise Loki’s job had provided in over six years. When he first started acting--successfully, professionally acting--there had been a balance. He’d made enough money to live on, he enjoyed his job, and few enough people recognized him that when he was stopped on the street it was an honor and a relief to know that his work had made a strong enough impression to be remembered. When the big studio roles started coming in, the balance between work and life decayed quickly. Suddenly everyone recognized him and stared at him and often stopped him. He made money he didn’t have time to spend, both because it was too much money and because all his free time had been swallowed up.  

“What is it?” Thor said, seeing his brother’s blank gaze trained on the floor.

“Lately I’ve been wishing I could take it all back. Pull every performance out of every brain. Repossess all that pleasure. Reclaim my face. Walk down the street with you, completely anonymous. Go to the park…” Loki trailed off. Thanks to photo and autograph seekers, getting bagels that morning had taken thirty minutes where it should have taken five. “What about you?” Loki asked, shaking himself out of his head. “Any contact?”

“I don’t know,” Thor shrugged. “I just focus on getting the paintings out there. Getting them into the places where people know to look. If I’m lucky someone somewhere will be able to read them. And if I’m really lucky they’ll see where my sentence leaves off and they’ll add another word to it, like I’ve tried to do with Turner.”

“Is that what you want?” Loki asked.

“That’s the point, isn’t it? To build something that builds on something so someone else can build on it?”

“Who says there’s a point? And anyway, you’re not your work,” Loki noted.

“No, I’m not,” Thor agreed, and smiled and leaned over to knock his cotton-clad shoulder against his morbid brother’s naked one.

“Though I suppose your work is you,” Loki conceded. “It isn’t _all_ of you by a long shot, but it is _all_ _you_.” Loki paused, but Thor didn’t argue, so he went on. “A record of your thoughts and the result of your actions. A map of things you’ve seen and how you’ve seen them.”

“Yes.”

“Do you keep a private sketchbook or do work that’s just yours?”

“No, it’s all out there,” Thor smiled, flailing his arms and flapping his hands. He was leaning back in his chair to let more air in his lungs and looking at Loki through eyes that were crowded shut by lifted cheeks. The squint that accompanied Thor’s smile meant that the blue was lost and there was only wet black with the kitchen light glinting off of it. “I put my notes and sketches on my blog and post in-progress shots and then pics of the finished pieces.”

“Why?”

“I learn a lot from it afterward. Someone else might too. Save them some time. If everyone kept everything they learned to themselves, we’d never get anywhere. Every day would be seven billion reinventions of the wheel. We’d have nothing. And I’ve got nothing to lose,” Thor mused, tipping his head, eyes twinkling again.

“And you’re satisfied?”

“Sure,” Thor smiled, eyes twinkling.

“So you want your art to do what art does--talk to the past and the future. That’s like saying you want water to be wet. You don’t have to want it; it’s going to happen.”

“There’s no guarantee,” Thor said, and Loki scoffed.  

“Maybe not for everyone, but there is for you. You’re in the Guggenheim and the Tate Modern, for fuck’s sake, Thor. You’ve made it.”

“Not necessarily. Maybe I managed to pick up the threads for the painters who speak to me. But there’s no telling if anyone will pick up mine and leave their own to be found later.”

“That’s out of your hands,” Loki conceded. “But it’s already begun. Just google ‘influenced by Thor Emerson’ and you’ll see that much.”

Thor hummed and raised his eyebrows.

“Isn’t there anything you want for yourself, even if you don’t need it or expect it?” Loki asked.

“Like what?”

“Like people to read the paintings back to you now so you know whether or not they understand. And if they do get it, to tell you why it is that they can read them. What paths they took. And, if they have maps of their own, to let you see them.”

“Oh yeah,” Thor nodded. “That’s always fun. I mostly get it from other artists--or got it, back in school. Though it’s probably more helpful to hear someone get it backward or sideways. Lets me know where I’m being unclear. You get all that in rehearsals, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Loki nodded. “And then most of the response to films and plays is to direction, writing, and editing. The response to me is largely a response to the hand I was dealt by DNA.”

“What about all the fans you write off at the stage door and on the street?” Thor remembered. “You know there’s more to all of them. Little universes crashing into you. They might have more to say if you gave them a minute.”

“I don’t have any minutes left to give. And if they lead with ‘Gimme!’ Or some variation of ‘I want to fuck you,’ then I know we were never really going to get along anyway.”

“Manners or bust.”

“Seriously. And call and response. I’ve given my call. I need to hear-”

“ _ Melting lords of death, avalanches, rivers and moments of passing through _ ,” Thor offered.

Loki doubled over with laughter for so long it cramped his belly.

Thor patted his brother’s back for a full minute before Loki finally sat up, wheezing, and cleared his throat.

“ _Yes, yes._ _Shoes and pudding_ ,” Loki panted, and watched the room blur though his watering eyes.

 

They brushed their teeth and then stretched out in bed again, thrilled by the dry shock of the cold sheets beneath their backs.

 

The scuffed, windy sound of cars stopping and going along the street below floated softly through the windowpanes and the light on the walls and ceiling had gone orange from the glow of streetlights.

“But you still haven’t answered,” Loki said quietly, thinking aloud. He often did so when he was alone, and frequently when he was with his brother, but never when he was with anyone else.

“Hmm?”

“You answered about painting--work. But what about you--all of you, today, now, just for yourself? What do  _ you _ want?”

“Oh,  _ that _ me” Thor sighed, and rolled onto his side, aiming his words into the bend of Loki’s neck, warming the skin there with his breath. “Not much, I guess. Music and swimming. Wine. Books...”

“Bonfires and Irish hot chocolate. Eating too much cheese,” Loki offered, and Thor hummed and nodded, bumping the tip of his nose against Loki’s skin. “And sleeping, sometimes on the sofa, but never alone. And to be snuggled.”

“Mmm,” Thor agreed. “I have all the sophistication of a twelve-year-old.”

“Same,” Loki said, softly laughing. “How ‘bout that’s our October?”

“Excellent,” Thor sighed. “And what’s your position on pillow forts these days?”   
“The only position on pillow forts is  _ pro _ ,” Loki replied. “Likewise blanket forts and combinations of the two.”

“Correct,” Thor said, and rewarded the response with a kiss to Loki’s shoulder.

 

Loki thought of metallic star-shaped stickers stuck to the tops of spelling tests. He thought of his brother’s paintings, which were both the sky and the sea. Day and night. Old and new. Bridges that Thor built for strangers while he slept alone in the grey dark for too many of his too few days. He was too late to speak to the artists whose worlds he loved most and too early to speak to those who would most love his. It was some terrible game of telephone that left everyone alone between the wires, hoping that they had achieved some comprehension, but unable to confirm. The answers were walled away behind expended lifetimes. It was time travel turned into a tease. Look, but don’t touch. A deferral. A deflection. And, ultimately, an occupation.

 

Not like lying in a soft bed, gently breathing. All work, however wonderful, was what you put up with in order to get to the bed and to the bonfire and to the sofa where you fell asleep reading with a bellyful of mulled wine and your legs tangled up with your brother’s.

  
  


Having gone to sleep early, they woke up with the sun but remained in bed, dozing for an hour and then drowsing in companionable silence, sifting through the lingering wisps of their dreams and enjoying the opportunity to be perfectly lazy. To lie down at the end of a long day was a joy dominated by relief, but to remain in bed in the morning was a purer sort of pleasure. One came to it unruffled and well rested, better able to appreciate the circumstances. In this case, there was little more for the brothers to do than experiment with various arrangements of limbs, sheets, and pillows until their bodies were so at ease they almost ceased to exist--at which point it was necessary to move again so that the nerves could grasp, and then grow numb to, a slightly different configuration of bliss.  

 

At seven thirty Thor’s stomach made a sound remarkably like a howling wolf. Loki laughed something about White Fang and the brothers took turns poking and pinching and blowing merciless gusts of morning breath at each other until Thor threatened to pee and Loki dumped him onto the floor.

“Should I shower and then pick up bagels while you’re showering?” Thor asked, stretched out on the hardwood with his hands folded behind his head.

“Yes,” Loki hissed.

“Coffee too?”

“Please.”

 

Thor was still gone when Loki came out of the bathroom. He went to the bed, thinking of lying down again, and saw a faint, blurred shadow on the center of the sheets. When he bent closer, the blur resolved itself into a dark blond curl. He laughed and picked up the hair, hunted down two more, then pulled a long blond strand from the pillow. He gathered them together, looped the longer one so that it would fit, and taped them all down flat against the day’s page in his agenda. Then he did lie down, still naked and wet, unwilling to relinquish this slow, sleepy morning, not wanting his remaining time with Thor to be urged out the door any sooner than it had to.

 

Thor got them pineapple cream cheese, which tied the bagels in nicely with the still-leftover fruit salad that they paired with them.

“This is, like, six different sorts of sugar plus fat,” Loki laughed, as his teeth winced at their breakfast.

“In the fall we’ll do six sorts of protein plus fat,” Thor smiled. “Remember when Dad would slice up leftover Italian sausage, heat it up in the campfire on skewer, and then give it to us on Ritz crackers?”

“Yes! Those were so fucking good,” Loki moaned. “I was craving them a couple weeks ago but I was afraid I’d accidentally start an actual fire if I tried it at the stove.”

  
  


After breakfast they sat sideways on Loki’s bed, leaning up against the wall as they sipped their coffee. Loki had gone quiet in the way Thor remembered from when they were young. Staring wide-eyed at nothing, lost in his thoughts.

“Need some time alone before you have to go back to work?” Thor asked, but Loki shook his head no and pinched the fabric of Thor’s trousers between his fingertips. “What is it, Lo? I know you don’t actually expect the millions of people who love your work to come up and say something thoughtful about it to you.”

“No, it’s just,” Loki began, but his voice broke to a shaky whisper by the third word. “In a couple hours we’ll have to say goodbye in this room instead of at the train, because I can’t count on our goodbye going uninterrupted in public. It’s bad enough that they eat up the hours of my life, but when you’re with me they do it to you too.”

Thor nodded and draped an arm over Loki’s shoulders.

“For fuck’s sake, we can’t even go out for breakfast,” Loki choked.

“I’m sorry,” Thor soothed, and Loki sighed.

“You’ve got nothing to be sorry about. And I know I’m being selfish. I should be grateful anyone knows I exist.”

“They know you exist because you do good work. If they want more of you, they can buy a fucking blu-ray and take a bunch of screenshots.”

Loki snorted and took a slow, shaky breath.

“You’ve got to get out of this goldfish bowl for a while,” Thor murmured. “Take a break. Live at your own pace.”

“I know, I will,” Loki nodded. “Three more months.”

“Understudies are always looking for their big break,” Thor pointed out, squeezing Loki’s shoulders and then shaking them gently.

“God, don’t tempt me.”

 

Loki had been right about what would happen at the train. The high traffic at the station meant that they were interrupted every thirty feet. When Thor looked back over his shoulder to wave goodbye one last time, Loki was staring helplessly at him as three different groups of people closed in to ask for photographs.

  
  
  


3.

  
  


Loki’s meeting was easy. It was all familiar. Like  _ Groundhog Day _ . The lie was slightly different on this go around, but Loki was still going to be telling it to strangers, most of whom would spend his monologues staring at his waist, thighs, crotch, or bottom, depending on their tastes and on which direction he was walking.

 

When Loki got home, his rooms still held Thor’s scent. His crocodile-brain said  _ He’s here! _ a millisecond before his ape-brain remembered  _ He’s gone _ . The disappointment made his eyes sting. His stomach felt like it was being wrung out like a wet cloth. Without his brother in it, the rooms once again felt as shabby as they were. Small and dark and never quite the right temperature. Undecorated. Still furnished with just the few thrift store necessities Loki had cautiously accumulated after he first moved here, flat broke, to try his hand at acting. A few quick darts of the eye were all it took to get the measure of the place. It was a fast, crowded space in a city that fit the same bill. It all seemed designed to give its residents the bum’s rush.

 

Out the window, the city buzzed and raced in a rhythm that left Loki feeling out of step and overwhelmed. The love he’d felt for this place and his occupation had been spent. He didn’t know if the hearts he’d once had for those things could be mended. And, if they could, he wondered whether they would be weaker or stronger for it afterward. He suspected the former. The rough patch he’d had with his father had been smoothed over, but the fractures below the surface had remained. At holidays now they stuck to superficial things so that only the smooth parts of their personalities had to brush up against each other. It left him feeling hollow.

 

Perhaps absence would make the heart grow fonder. Loki had been going at it here--and on location and in sound stages--for twelve years. Surely that was too many of anything, for Loki at least. Thor had been painting longer, but Thor had been out in wide green spaces full of softly trilling quiet. Uninterrupted. He was probably there right now, with his back to the world, staring at a canvas that mapped out his own universe.

 

Loki wondered if that freedom fed Thor’s stamina. Loki was tangled up in other people’s worlds. Saying their words. Saying them again, take after take, until the director got what they wanted. Embodying someone who’d never existed, in a world that he’d never lived in, within the limits of the script, and in harmony with the interpretations of the other actors. He’d never made anything that was wholly his own. Hadn’t thought to play god in that way, but now he wondered. Still, you had to want something. Something that didn’t yet exist. And you had to want it enough to be willing to build it. All Loki wanted was to head north to see his brother. But, simple though that was, it would remain out of reach for three months. Screwing over his peers at the theater was something Loki didn’t want to do, which, he supposed, was the other side of wanting to do something. At this point he’d take whatever he could get.

 

When Loki picked up his phone it chirped in his hand, startling him so that he nearly dropped it. The excerpt of a message briefly lit the screen. When Loki opened it, it was from Thor, who wanted to know if he was out of work yet, and if so, how the meeting had gone.

_ Kill me? _ Loki typed.

_ Schedule? _

_ Weekends off until it opens, then Mondays and Tuesdays off for the run (thru Sept). _

_ Can you spend those weekends getting toasted? _ Thor asked.

_ Are you offering to provide the means? _

_ Yes. May I trouble you for accommodations? _

_ YASSSSSSS!!! What’s your schedule like?  _ Loki said.

_ Open. _

_ Want to come this Fri pm and go back Mon am then? _

_ Sure. I’ll probs come early on Fri and flail around at the Met until you’re free. _

_ Perf. _

  
  


Loki feared that having Thor’s visit to look forward to would somehow make it all worse. That it would be like watching a pot boil. That the days of rehearsals that stood in his way would drag on forever. Instead it was like a carrot, dangling in front of him, cheering him through the precise, repetitive work. The fear of looking anything less than excellent at his craft nipped at his heels, too. Terror often brought out the best in him; if there was no room for error, he could only take the perfect path since it was all he could see.

 

Still, the work had lost something. Loki felt like he’d seen though the last veil. The one he really needed. Now acting was like accounting or anything else. The people in the profession understood you and could help you and it was a pleasure and a relief to find yourself on the same page with them, but you were still confined to a small book. Loki had never felt its borders so distinctly before. It was one volume on life’s shelf, and it was one that could be swapped out--and sometimes was whether you liked it or not. Loki could go work a cash register at a bookstore for the rest of his life and that would be no more or less an employment than acting. No bigger or smaller, despite what the pay and popular opinion would suggest. Just providing a service. Only in that case, when he was off the clock, he would belong to himself.

 

He supposed he could belong to himself now. It was only a matter of figuring out who he was and wrenching his time back from anyone who tried to take it. He’d invested so many hours in discovering the identities of the imaginary people he was portraying that he’d neglected to do himself the same favor. He couldn’t be his work any more than his brother could. It wasn’t the whole world.

 

He wondered if he could answer the question he’d asked Thor: what do you want?

 

Thor’s response seemed to have things pretty well covered. Music and swimming. Wine. Books. Loki would add baguettes with butter, privacy, and back-scratchings to the list.

  
  


When Friday evening arrived Thor was waiting on the street in the full heat wrought by a day of sun and by the thousands of passing cars that set the air shimmering over their searing hoods. People liked to say “I don’t sweat, I glow,” but in Thor’s case it was close to the truth. His skin plumped up just slightly as his blood rose to the surface, seeking air. It filled in the fine lines in his face and gave him a flush that whispered of health and sex and strength and something savage that had long ago gone dormant in everyone else but was somehow dominant in Thor. His pale pink chambray shirt was thin enough to qualify as gauzy and his white trousers were only slightly more substantial above plain canvas shoes. He looked like a photograph from a summer fashion catalog. His long hair was fluffy rather than wilted, and standing taller by the minute as it went wavy in the humidity. Loki couldn’t have stopped his grin at the sight if he’d wanted to.

“You willing to give dinner at a restaurant another shot?” Thor asked, cocking his head and playfully narrowing his eyes, hinting at some hidden inner resolve he wanted his brother to let him test.

Loki raised an eyebrow and nodded his assent.

 

Thor hailed them a cab, both to spare them interruptions and to keep Loki in air conditioning for as long as possible. They sat with their legs angled toward each other to keep their knees from digging into the seatbacks in front of them. Their eyes bounced between looking out each other’s windows and looking at each other’s faces so that every now and again they caught each other staring and they smiled and then went back to watching the people and buildings blur past.

 

The restaurant wasn’t visible from the street. It was in an older area of the city where the art students pooled resources to afford larger spaces and the businesses were rusty and unglamorous. Thor knew it from when he’d lived nearby during college. The entrance was inside an anonymous building, up a half-flight of stairs. Coconut and lime hit Loki’s nose as they climbed the steps.

“Pad Thai on the menu?” Loki asked.

“Yep.”

“Good?”

“You’re gonna die,” Thor grinned.

 

Thor asked the hostess if it was possible to sit in one of the two booths at the back. It was, and they made it three quarters of the way through their meal before someone recognized Loki’s voice and came tiptoeing, wide-eyed, toward their table. Loki’s seat faced the wall, but Thor’s looked out across the restaurant. Thor saw the stranger, camera at the ready, coming up behind his unsuspecting sibling, who was contentedly slurping noodles while a piece of peanut clung to his lip.

“Excuse me,” Thor said softly to his brother, then rose from his seat to stand in the aisle, blocking the way to their table.

 

Thor would only own up to six feet and three inches. Loki never knew why. Loki himself was a generous six two, which meant his brother was easily six four--and that still felt like low-balling it by more than a bit. And Thor’s voice, while never truly loud, was deep and rough in a way that suggested decades of whiskey and screaming, though it had merely descended, almost overnight, in the middle of adolescence. And then there was the face. Equal parts Christie Brinkley and Peter O’Toole, and, really, what was anyone meant to do when confronted with that--especially for the first time? Loki was accustomed to the sights and sounds of Thor and they still floored him at every turn. They made him think of the older meanings of awe: power to inspire reverence; fear, dread. Tonight Thor seemed to Loki like a thinly veiled, AWOL angel. Not the feathery familiar beauties from the second and third spheres that showed up on Christmas and sympathy cards. Thor was one of the terrible things from the first sphere. The nightmares that brushed up against God. The things that burned and roared and wore too many eyes.

“The bathroom’s up front across from the entrance,” Thor said.

“Oh, I know-”

“Then there’s no  _ good _ reason for you to be here,” Thor continued.

“I just-”

“I’m going to count to _five_ ,” Thor cut in, smiling, “and you’re going to be gone by _two_. Ready?”

The fan took a slightly shrinking step backward as Thor took a loose, swaying stride forward.

“One.”

Loki heard the pad of fast-retreating feet on the worn pile of the carpet. He pinched his lips between his teeth to keep from laughing aloud but couldn’t keep his shoulders from shaking.

 

Thor dropped back into the booth with a pleased, bouncing thump to the cushion. The muscles in his face were trying to quash a smile and his features flickered between a grimace and a bright, beaming grin. It only strengthened Loki’s earlier impression that Thor was one thing living within another. But Loki couldn’t work out which way it went. Was Thor something old, dark, and wild that wore a skin of sweetness and light? Or was he cream and honey hidden behind a wolf’s teeth? Probably both, Loki supposed. Binaries were generally bunk. “Shades of grey” had been his motto since he was twenty-five.

“Thanks,” Loki breathed.

“My pleasure,” Thor said, through the left corner of his lips, around a mouthful of red curry. “How’s the group this time around?” he asked, when he’d finished chewing.

“Great,” Loki shrugged. “Top to bottom, cast and crew. Struck gold again.”

“But?” Thor urged, seeing slack indifference on his brother’s face.

“But it’s still work and that only goes so far. I don’t know. I’ve been trying to get all my ducks in a row or something lately, but I think I might only have one duck.”

Thor’s laugh was something between a scoff and a coo. The sound was sweet, sympathetic, and slightly disbelieving. It gave Loki something better than hope: encouragement, perhaps, and a shot of confidence.

  
  


When they got back to the apartment Loki saw his brother’s bags sitting in the chair by the window. There was beer in the fridge that hadn’t been there that morning. A cheerful paper gift bag with a brightly wrapped box tucked inside it was waiting on the kitchen counter--Thor’s preferred method of transporting weed. When Loki opened it he found everything rolled and ready to smoke.

“Nice,” Loki said, and picked up one of the bobby pins Thor brought for him to use as clips.

 

They lit their cigarettes with the stove and Thor flipped on the fan in the hood to keep the room from getting too foul. Then they pulled up two stools and sat smoking while they wondered what to do. They whittled it down until the debate was between going out for ice cream cones--which were, for no explicable reason, always infinitely more satisfying than bowls scooped at home--or staying in and drinking beer while they watched silent movies on YouTube.

“We could do both,” Thor proposed. “The night is young.”

That suggestion made sense from Thor, and made sense  _ of _ him.

_ Both _ .

Of course. Why force it to be one or the other? Melting lords of death, avalanches, rivers, moments of passing through--and pudding, bedside angels, and the color in ripe plums.

“I think I’m game,” Loki nodded, and waved the dwindling stub of his blunt in the air. “This always takes the edge off.”

 

They set Loki’s hair dryer to cool and used it to blow some of the smoke out of their clothes while they gargled mint mouthwash.

 

Out in the hall they opted to take the stairs down to the street so that more air would move over them during the descent and freshen them up a bit further.

 

The sun was behind the skyscrapers now, but was still bright. Its light was going yellow at the low angle and shadows were a deep violet that would have stretched out for miles if they hadn’t been blocked by brick walls. The air was hot, but the heat was waning and the warmth would be a welcome counterpoint to the ice cream. The brothers walked fast on long legs to make themselves more irritating to follow. When someone finally did make a beeline for Loki, Thor put himself in their path.

“Nope,” Thor said. “He’s off the clock, I hardly ever get to see him, and I’m sick of our conversations getting interrupted.”

Loki heard an apology that sounded faint from being deflected by his brother’s body, then they hurried on their way.

“Can you stay here and do this all the time?” Loki asked.

“I’m getting pretty goddamn tempted,” Thor admitted.

 

While they waited in line at the ice cream parlour, Loki drilled Thor about his latest paintings until Thor handed over his phone. Loki flipped through the in-progress pics and asked about all the methods, the dimensions, the concepts, and what music Thor had been listening to while he worked.

Thor was describing a brush he’d built for himself when another voice cut in.

“Loki, can I get a-”

“You’re not even going to say ‘excuse me’ before you start in on that?” Thor asked, leaning over and bending down to put his face directly in front of the stranger’s.

Loki watched the fan’s face go white and then red before they turned around.

“You were talking about the bristles,” Loki reminded, and Thor resumed his story of buying the hair from horses’ tails by weight online.

 

“Thanks for being a dick for me tonight,” Loki sighed, when they were back in his kitchen washing the sticky remains of ice cream off their fingers.

“My pleasure,” Thor said, with a helpless grin that gave away how much he meant it.

“I think I’m too full for beer,” Loki said, patting his mildly protruding belly.

“It’ll keep.”

 

Thor took a shower to wash away the day spent on the train and the coating of stale dust acquired on the city streets, wrought by six weeks of drought.

“Leave it running and I’ll step in at the back end while you go out the front,” Loki called, slurring the words around his toothbrush as he stood at the bathroom sink.

They each saw legs and backsides disappearing behind the shower curtain as they swapped places. Loki made a shriek worthy of a toddler when he stepped under the icy spray his brother had left on for him.

 

“Someone uploaded Epstein’s  _ The Fall of the House of Usher _ ,” Thor called, as Loki burst, shivering, from the bathroom and launched himself onto the bed beside his brother. “You could have turned up the hot water.”

“I wanted to see what it was like,” Loki gritted out, through chattering teeth. “I don’t know how you could stand it.”

“I figured you’d be fine since you’re always too warm.”

“That was what I thought too, but apparently I have a very narrow comfort zone when it comes to temperature these days.”

 

Thor started the movie and then started laughing as Loki continued to vibrate beside him. Within a minute Loki was side-winding his way across the bed and attempting to wedge his right half beneath Thor’s left.

“Here,” Thor said, and set the laptop aside before rising up on all fours and reaching to turn off the air conditioner. “Lie down in the warm spot I made.”

Loki scrambled into the hot depression left by his brother’s body and moaned his approval. Thor dragged the blankets up over them both, then shuffled close to drape an arm over Loki’s waist and a leg across the backs of his thighs to warm him further.

“What’s your duck?” Thor asked.

“What?”

“You said you were getting your ducks in a row but you might only have one. Is it work?”

“Yeah,” Loki sighed. “I think that’s why I’m so pissed off all the time. The job is all I have, but it doesn’t give me everything I need.”

“It mostly seems to take things from you lately,” Thor noted. “Doesn’t leave you with much time for anything else.”

“I know,” Loki agreed. “And I swear the hours keep getting longer. I’ve always spent time at home learning lines and doing research and I thought that was an intrusion. But now there’s press. And travel eats up the days. Dealing with fans is part of the job, since it’s more publicity, but there’s no structure to it. Everyone likes to pretend it’s free publicity, but, like you said, I’m off the clock, so it’s at my expense… And then I feel like I can’t complain because I have everything so easy.”

“You only have twenty-four hours in your day, like everyone else,” Thor said, and scratched a zig-zag up and down Loki’s spine. “You’re not public property just because you’re well paid and in the public eye.”

Loki hummed and let himself enjoy the drag of nails against his skin. The heat from Thor’s body was flooding the air beneath the blankets, providing another layer of comfort for Loki to wallow in.

“God, how are you so warm?” Loki boggled. “I’m still freezing.”

“Gotta get some more meat on your bones,” Thor diagnosed, lightly pinching Loki’s flanks and butt. “I’m guessing you’ve been skipping the grocery store to avoid fans.”

“Yep,” Loki sighed.

“Dipshit,” Thor scolded, but his voice was fond and his hand was moving smoothly across Loki’s back.

“Are there things you want to do this weekend?” Loki asked. “We can go out. I’m just being a brat.”

“No, I’d be shooing people away from you all day. I think I’d lose my temper. And we’d definitely lose a lot of time to it.”

Thor continued to rake Loki’s spine with his nails until Loki’s eyes went unfocused. He thought his brother was about to fall asleep but then Loki made a sound low in his throat.

“What was that about?” Thor murmured.

“I just did the math.”

“On what?”

“Lost time,” Loki answered. “Us. I was seventeen when you left for college. That was seventeen years ago. We’ve been apart half my life.”

“Jesus,” Thor breathed, and Loki nodded.

“Now the proportions are about to shift. This is the part where our trajectories meet and cross before diverging.”

They could picture each other drifting apart. See the old men sitting under reading lamps in houses a hundred or more miles apart. See the infrequent phone calls and dwindling commonalities. See the indirect ways in which they existed for each other: as yellowing articles in art and entertainment magazines, as pixels on glowing screens, as audio scraping its way through shitty cell phone speakers.

“No.”

“No?” Loki laughed. “Are you going to reorder time?”

Thor’s eyes seemed to linger somewhere just below Loki’s eyes before they came up to meet his gaze.

“Yes,” Thor said, and Loki laughed again.

“Of course you are. Silly question.”

“I am though,” Thor smiled, and Loki raised his eyebrows expectantly and watched Thor’s lips for the answer. “Time is space. We’re space. I’ll reorder us so we’re in the same spot and then we’ll have our time back.”

“Piece of cake,” Loki granted, with a slow nod.

“Mmm,” Thor agreed, and narrowed his eyes slightly. “Will you really come up in October?”

“Yes,” Loki sighed, curling toward his brother until his forehead was pressed against Thor’s collarbone. “It’s the only thing keeping me going,” he confessed, and felt Thor press a kiss to the top of his head.

“How often can I come down in the meantime?” Thor asked, and hitched the leg that was still draped over his brother a bit higher so it rested on the flat plane of Loki’s hip rather than sliding down the slope of his thigh.

“As often as you like,” Loki shrugged. “You have the keys. The invitation is open.”

“And you’ll tell me if I wear out my welcome?” Thor asked softly.

“If that happened I would tell you. But I can tell you now, it won’t.”

Loki reached up to turn the air conditioning back on, then flopped back down onto the bed with a pleased grunt.

“Aren’t you still cold?” Thor asked, testing the skin on the back of Loki’s arm with his fingertips and finding it cool.

“Yes, but if I siphon off your heat by snuggling you then I’ll need the AC because you’re an oven,” Loki reasoned, shuffling closer to his brother and restoring Thor’s right thigh to its position atop his hip before wrapping his left arm around Thor’s waist.

Thor rubbed Loki’s shoulders in smooth figure-eight passes. Loki watched his brother’s face fall while the motions of his hand remained the same.

“What’s the matter?” Loki asked.

“Lost time… I just… feel like I blinked and lost a decade,” Thor said, staring at the fine lines at the edges of Loki’s eyes and mouth.

“Same. It’s been going by so fast lately. The month between Thanksgiving and Christmas used to feel like an eternity when we were kids. Now I could swear it doesn’t even exist.”

“I know,” Thor said. “It’s awful. The length of a year keeps shrinking in relation to our lifespan.”

“Damn,” Loki breathed, as his mind raced ahead to imagine the speed of life at fifty, sixty, and seventy. It would all be a blur. “I don’t suppose you know how to stop time altogether.”

Thor opened his mouth and then closed it again without a word. His lips curved into a frown so small and sweet Loki could hardly bear to look at it. It was an old face, from boyhood. The one that was born upon receiving news of a magnitude that had, by its receipt, only just rendered its recipient capable of comprehending it. A portrait of empathy.

Thor looked down and leaned in to kiss the corner of Loki’s mouth.

“Was that consolation or a solution?” Loki whispered.

Thor squinted, weighing something.

“The latter,” Thor decided, and kissed his brother again, feeling teeth against his lips where Loki was grinning. “If there’s no space between us, then there’s no time,” Thor winked.

Loki huffed a soft laugh and kissed the firm curve of Thor’s smiling cheek before craning his neck to nibble at Thor’s earlobe.

“Aren’t we just making time move faster?” Loki whispered, and kissed his way along the edge of Thor’s jaw, up his chin, and onto his lips again. “It does fly during fun.”

“True,” Thor conceded, blushing a bit at Loki’s admission and trying not to let his face get too manic. “But it flies in a circle.”

“How’s that?”

“Memory loops time.”

Loki hummed and pressed his forehead to Thor’s lips.

It felt true. And pleasure had an edge: the moments he and Thor had spent breathing back and forth at the bottom of the pool took up more of his memory than all the years passed in classrooms. The wetness of Thor’s clean, smiling mouth as they shared their cigarette a week ago had replayed dozens of times in Loki’s mind already--it had often been difficult to think of anything else. And there were still four hairs taped to a page in Loki’s agenda. That was the only entry that was meant to hold onto the past. Everything else in it was about what Loki was obliged to do in the future.

 

Journaling suddenly made sense to him. A record in which to keep memories fresh. Another way to trap time and hold onto what he wanted. He wondered if he could hold onto his brother’s words and actions the way he held onto lines of dialogue and stage directions. Wondered if writing them out and reading them aloud them would cement them in his memory. He wondered how much would be lost in translation--if there would be a danger of remembering the journal rather than remembering his brother. But memorizing a journal about his brother still seemed preferable to most of the things he’d been asked to memorize--and certainly better than forgetting anything.

 

Loki looked up again and nipped at Thor’s lower lip, then felt Thor’s mouth gently tugging at his own.  

“But isn’t this too much to ask?” Loki whispered. His pronunciation of the M was rendered slightly mushy by the welcome obstacle of Thor’s lip.

Thor leaned his head back on his neck so that Loki’s face would be in better focus, then beamed at his brother from above the double chins he’d acquired with the pose.

“I’ve literally wiped your ass,” Thor said, smiling so wide his left eye shut completely.

Loki’s face was still doubtful. His eyebrows were turned up in the center, pleading and worried, and his lips were pulled thin and braced, curling in on themselves as if trying to seek cover.

“This is a far cry from cleaning up a three-year-old’s butt.”

“Pfff! You were, like, fifteen,” Thor said, and Loki snorted and threw his weight forward to jostle his brother.

“I’m serious,” Loki said, when they’d finished giggling, and he heard Thor draw and release a deep breath.

“It isn’t much to ask at all,” Thor said, as Loki’s nostrils flared for half a second with pleasant shock. “I know that sounds strange,” Thor admitted, shrugging his eyebrows at himself. “I’ve seen enough now to know not to take everyone else’s word for anything. Lately life is like being up in an airplane. Noticing that there aren’t really any states or countries. No names or borders.” Thor felt Loki’s breast expand and pause, pressing their ribs together with a held breath. “I’ve spent more time with you than with anyone,” Thor murmured, and reached to tuck a damp curl behind Loki’s left ear, wanting to see the pink edge of the shell. “Love you more than anyone. Everyone else is so small next to you. Like ants. I’d be a fool to let them stand in the way.”

“Proportions again,” Loki sighed, letting the air rush out of his lungs. Thor hummed and kissed the tip of Loki’s nose, then leaned back again for a clear look at Loki’s face.

“What about you?” Thor said.

“What about me?”

“Is this too much?” Thor clarified, dipping his chin to gesture at their entangled limbs. “Is that why you asked?”

“No, it’s nothing,” Loki smiled, then scrunched his face up in a wince. “That didn’t come out right, sorry,” he laughed. “It’s… everything. But it’s easy. Like breathing.”

Thor grinned with all of his teeth and kissed his way across Loki’s left cheek before hooking his chin over Loki’s shoulder.

 

Loki had done his best to talk himself down over the course of the preceding week. He needed his heart to be lying flat on its back in the dirt so that it wouldn’t have far to fall. He’d convinced himself it was just the combination of THC and affection that made it so easy to imagine that Thor was through with bounds and distance. Told himself Thor’s sweetness had been part of pity, or sympathy, or concern. That it was merely graceful caretaking that arose from a familial sense of obligation, or, at best, from fraternal fondness.

 

But it hadn’t been wishful thinking. Loki saw what he had seen because it had been there. All the veils really were gone now. Their absence showed Loki’s work for what it really was, but it worked to reveal his brother too. It seemed impossible that it had happened after so much time apart, yet it seemed equally likely that the distance had somehow been responsible for the revelation. That the hardship had enabled the change, much like the heat from a forest fire coaxes pine cones to open.

 

Thor tightened his arm around Loki’s ribs and rolled onto his back so that Loki was sprawled on top of him. Loki spent a moment situating his hips so that their cocks weren’t getting crushed and then slumped over Thor’s body like dough. His head hung over Thor’s right shoulder and his face pressed into Thor’s hair where it was spread out on the pillow. The strands were still wet. They soothed Loki’s cheek and made him think of mothers gently laying cold compresses on the fevered brows of children. Of all the rain that hadn’t fallen that spring. Of the welcome gloom of autumn with its breath of rotting leaves.

 

Loki could smell his own shampoo and soap, their citrus and cedar new and bright again for having a novel source. He could even smell himself. His scent had been stamped onto Thor as they held each other and brushed onto Thor by the bedsheets. Loki supposed the same thing had happened to him with Thor’s scent, but he was too comfortable to bother sniffing himself to check.

 

Lying like this, Thor could scratch Loki’s back with both hands. He pushed the blankets down past Loki’s waist and swirled his nails symmetrically across Loki’s skin, beginning below the neck and swooping out to the tops of the shoulderblades. Darting in toward the spine and following it south to the tailbone. Lingering there a moment because it made Loki hum in his ear. Following Loki’s flanks up and digging his fingers in to make his brother squirm, then soothing the place with the palms of his hands and running his nails over the furrows of the ribs. It felt like strumming a harp. Smooth and soothing and four thousand years old.

“Am I putting you to sleep?” Thor asked, and heard soft, throaty laughter in his ear.

“Mmmhmm.”

“You sound furious.”

“Mmm,” Loki agreed, with his lips around Thor’s earlobe so that the sound buzzed against Thor’s skin.

Loki felt his body sink as Thor’s breast dipped with an amused huff. It was tempting to stay where he was and sleep like a baby, but Loki didn’t want to rush the weekend away with sleep. He lifted his head and straightened himself out so that he was nose to nose with his brother. Just a tiny change in position. His legs were still lying on the bed, straddling Thor’s thighs, and his arms were still were thrown up over Thor’s shoulders, but he was wide awake now. Finally in alignment, with his curls sliding down and bouncing against the edges of Thor’s cheeks to make a tunnel around their faces. Thor’s eyes were two glints in Loki’s shade.

 

When Loki dipped his head to kiss his brother he found Thor’s mouth was hot and wet. It struck him as strange that he could feel those things so clearly when his own mouth was the same. Thor’s hands were two warm islands of pressure on his cool back, slowly gliding down to grip him by the waist. Thor rolled his hips up as Loki sucked on his tongue and the wave continued through Thor’s belly and ribs, lifting Loki with it, shifting their skin so that air slipped in between them and chilled their sweat. Thor’s cock was standing up between Loki’s spread legs, brushing against the cleft of his ass in time with their kisses. It still moved to the beat of Loki’s mouth when Loki bit Thor’s thighs. When Loki licked Thor’s balls, he lost track of which motions were caused by his tongue and which were just Thor’s excited twitching. When he slid his lips down the whole length of it, resting his nose in blond curls, he felt the head of his brother’s cock shifting against the back of his throat even though he was holding perfectly still.

 

Loki kept his left hand on Thor’s balls, lightly cupping them, carefully reading them, feeling them tighten as his lips slid up and down Thor’s skin. He could hear the short, shallow breaths Thor was taking and the airy whines that were filtering into the exhales. And then the pause. The held breath. The thrown hips and the sharp cry. Everything in Loki’s hand and mouth pulsing while his tongue flooded with the taste of magnolias and the sea.

 

Loki kept his lips pressed tight to Thor’s skin as he pulled off. He caught the little drop of come that tried to escape with his fingertip and licked it up.

“You okay?” Thor panted, going up on his elbows to get a better look at his brother, who was kneeling between the sprawl of his thighs.

“Yeah. You?”

“Yes,” Thor laughed, and patted the space beside him until Loki was stretched out there.

Thor let himself catch his breath, then swung a leg over and crouched above his brother to lick the taste of himself from Loki’s lips. He soon learned that Loki threw his head back and writhed whenever he had hands, lips, or teeth on his throat. Loki’s legs kept pressing out where they were caged in by Thor’s knees, begging by trying to spread. After hundreds of slow kisses to Loki’s breast and belly, Thor finally gave up on teasing. He shuffled back and let Loki’s legs fall apart the way they’d been asking to.

 

Thor kissed the creases of the thighs until the mattress stopped his chin. When he didn’t lift his head, Loki took the hint and pulled his knees up toward his shoulders to let his brother lick his hole. The fuzzy wetness of Thor’s tongue was thrilling and soothing. A soft, brushing tease that traced all the hidden pleats and curves while Loki’s balls rested in the socket of Thor’s right eye. Loki could feel the motions of the lid where it was pressed against his skin. Sometimes Thor’s lashes shifted or fluttered. The tickling drag of them was even softer than Thor’s tongue, but felt louder for being so unexpected. Loki decided he would ask for head-to-toe butterfly kisses in the morning when they had the patience to be slow. But now he needed Thor to go faster. He dropped his legs and arched his back to aim his cock at Thor’s lips and Thor laughed and was still laughing when he swallowed Loki down, humming his amusement against the base of Loki’s prick. Thor’s lips felt full and rich and his hand stepped in smoothly every time his head rose, adding a wringing twist that rushed Loki upward until everything went bright.

Thor held still as Loki came, letting his brother thrust up into his lips for those last, descending peaks that always trailed behind the summit.

Afterward, Thor crawled up the bed and plastered himself to Loki’s right side, wrapping his arm around Loki’s waist and resting his head on a bony shoulder.

“You okay?” Loki asked.

Thor hummed and nodded.

 

They fell asleep as they were and woke the same way. They were confused by the room, which was too bright for how few lights they had left on, until they realized their nap had been twelve hours long.

 

Saturday and Sunday sprinted past in shared puffs of smoke and bursts of wild laughter that made the brothers thrash on the bed, shaking their heads in delighted disbelief at the words that passed their lips.

 

Monday morning saw them staring with lost faces, each of them finding it incomprehensible that they had to be parted.

“Four-and-a-half days,” Thor said, intending to soothe both of them, but rendering their lips tight and their eyes wet instead.

 

Loki left his brother behind in his bed and went out the door of rooms that had suddenly grown dear to him for all that they contained. His lunch break found him frantically writing down everything he could remember of the weekend, however minute. He wished he’d taken pictures so that he could diagram them and overlay them with words, recording the temperature of the air and the scent of Thor’s skin.

 

When Loki’s phone winked with a text from Thor, he expected a sentence or two telling him he’d gotten home safe. Instead it was a photograph of a full grocery sack. Another similar shot appeared as he was trying to see that was in the first bag. Next a rotisserie chicken in its little cardboard suitcase and plastic bubble. Then a picture of his refrigerator, full of fruit and cheese and veggies. And, finally, a selfie of his brother, who was pulling a face under the yellow kitchen light. Thor had tucked in his jaw so that his neck folded up into rolls. He was puckering his lips so that they almost folded over--giving himself that dimpled, cellulite chin that Loki always worked hard to avoid when he was crying onstage or on camera--and he was flaring his nostrils while he rolled his eyes back in his head.

_ Move over Blue Steel _ , Loki typed.

_ Fairest of them all 5evah _ , Thor replied.

_ Can you stay for dinner? _

_ Yes. May I also stay for breakfast?  _ Thor asked.

_ Yesssssssss. _

 

Loki’s coworkers wanted to know what he’d had for lunch to give himself so much energy. When he said he hadn’t eaten anything, they assumed it was cocaine.

 

“Three-and-a-half days,” Thor smiled, when Loki came through the door that evening.

“You’ll spend them all on the train,” Loki said, smiling anyway and kissing his brother once for hello and twice for thank you and three times for love you madly.

“I got something to keep myself busy,” Thor said, tossing his head toward the bed where a new iPad and stylus had been opened. “I’m gonna do color studies on the trip.”

Loki hummed and they sat down to dinner.

“Thanks for all the grocery shopping I won’t have to do.”

“My pleasure,” Thor nodded.

  
  


Thor regularly padded the weekend visits on both ends, coming in on Friday afternoon and departing Tuesday morning. Sometimes he came for a whole week, leaving his studio full of canvases that were covered in thick pools of acrylic paint that needed days to cure.

 

Thor’s habit of running his brother’s errands on Monday mornings left Loki with time of his own again. Spending much of that rescued time with his brother opened doors to memories that had been locked away for years in Loki’s mind. The same occurred in Thor. When they talked they always set off little chain reactions of recollections in each other and recovered things they hadn’t realized they’d lost. Their lives coiled open like roses.

  
  


When the show began in September, Loki had the patience that came from good rest, low expectations, and revised priorities. It let him breeze his way through the stage door meat market every evening. Knowing it could only be impersonal kept him from taking anything personally.

 

At the end of the month, on a Wednesday night when Thor was away, Loki took some farewell photos of his apartment, rented a van, and dropped everything but his mattress off at the same thrift shop he’d bought it from.

 

When October arrived Loki was able to enjoy it. He wasn’t exhausted the way he had been--and expected still to be--in June. He was simply ready. Fall was waiting with complexities that were easy to mistake for contradictions. The rain that so resembled spring, falling on worn grass and spilling down bare branches, not waking anything now but lulling the earth to sleep, like a bath before bed. The days warm enough for swimming while the chill of the nights welcomed bonfires. The sun still high enough to burn bared skin, but low enough to starve the leaves off the trees. The beginning of the harvest and the end of growth. The dates and daylight waning while the memory of schooldays forever cemented autumn as the beginning of the year.

 

And there was privacy. Ten acres. And the house, pole barn, and pool were surrounded by a low wall topped with a high fence. The driveway was gated. No one could knock on the door or peek in the window. Loki assumed the set-up was meant to guard against theft--both of the art Thor made and the art he collected through trades. Thor explained that that was sort of the reason: if there was a theft and he had to call the cops, he’d have to get rid of all his weed first, which he felt would be bothersome.

 

The wide open spaces of Thor’s home slowed time for Loki. It took several steps to cross the kitchen rather than a pivot on the heel. The long sofas in front of the windows let him lie still all morning, looking out to learn how the birds lived. The bed was wide and was not shoved against the wall for lack of room. Each side of it was free, and Loki was welcome to climb in and out from either. There was no rush of business-suited bodies and cars with blaring horns blurring past outside the windows. No scramble for a cab. No waiting in line, going nowhere fast as the night ticked away. The hallway was fifteen feet long, whereas there was no such place in Loki’s apartment, and it was lined with paintings, each of them a window into someone else’s universe. Loki could dip into lifetimes that had drunk from other lifetimes, worlds nested like Russian dolls, as he walked from the office to the bathroom.

 

Loki knew film, theater, and acting accomplished the same thing. The passing of a torch. But that wouldn’t work for his world. His world was here, now, interleaved with his brother’s, and after so much time apart, he wasn’t willing to sacrifice more.

 

In his quest to make a better record, Loki started taking photos with one of Thor’s old cameras. Mostly shots of his brother meant for no eyes but their own. But some were of Thor working, and when Taschen wanted to do a book on Thor’s paintings, they asked to use the photographs. Loki wasn’t keen on the idea of sharing any of his personal life and free time with strangers ever again. But this was the part of his private life that overlapped with the public part of his brother. Loki supposed that if he had anything left to say to the rest of the world, it was  _ Thor _ . In thirteen billion years, Thor was the one thing Loki deemed worth remembering for longer than a lifetime. But Loki was only willing to grant the world that part of Thor that went into his work. The Thor who thought in space and color. Who reached forward and backward through time. Who stood on the dead shoulders of giants in the hope that he could count himself among the stepping stones for future feet.

 

The other Thor--the one who gave back-scratches and butterfly kisses to his spoiled, besotted brother--was the Thor the world had failed to see. And Loki could never forgive them for it, nor could he thank them enough. Billions of people had had thirty-five years and trillions of chances and Thor had slipped through every set of fingers to land in Loki’s waiting hands. It was incomprehensible. And inevitable. And it was an oversight that Loki was going to force the world to live with. They would know nothing of Thor’s rough voice and his soft, earthy humor. Of his empathy and grace in putting up with Loki’s greed for him. Of the patient, careful pace of him, filling bird feeders so slowly that the creatures came and waited for their breakfast from atop his head and shoulders. Of his solid, silent deliberation, standing almost as tall as his canvases, hands on hips, eyes narrowed, mind sprinting through a thousand possibilities before mixing just the right shade of blue. Of the way he was like a walking sedative to Loki, making him feel sleepy and sated, like a housecat having its chin scratched.

  
  


Portraiture crept into Thor’s life. The first paintings he’d ever done for himself. A catalog of what most struck him about his brother on a given day. Sometimes it was a spectacular case of bed-head that begged to be recorded. Sometimes it was a sleepiness in Loki’s face and posture that Thor enjoyed both because he’d been responsible for it and because it made Loki look like a boy again. Sometimes it was the way the cool daylight played tricks with Loki’s colors, shifting the green of his eyes toward aqua, pushing the pale pinks of his skin closer to violet, and making his glossy black curls glint blue.

 

In the southeast corner of Thor’s studio, next to an overloaded bookshelf, there was a comfy old sofa. It was the one that every family had had in the eighties. Camel colored, shot through with tweedy streaks of slightly darker brown. It had a boxy frame and three sections of thick cushions. Thor had picked it up at a garage sale a decade ago but it still smelled slightly of damp basement. Loki loved the ugly thing and spent most of his time reading, napping, and writing there while his brother was working.

 

“If I got a space heater, would you be willing to pose?” Thor asked, on an afternoon when Loki was stretched out under a blanket, doing little more than blinking.

“Nude?” Loki wondered, rousing and brightening.

“Preferably.”

“So I’d just have to lie around naked, doing nothing?”

“That’s the job description, yeah.”

“Dream come true,” Loki sighed.

Given the subject and the setting, the ensuing paintings should have looked like Lucian Freud. But they didn’t. They were still Thor, reaching further back into Turner to find feather-light strokes and razor-sharp details overlaid with soft air and light.

 

Soon Thor was working forty hours a week on the paintings that were meant to be shown, down from almost eighty. The reduction in supply meant an increase in demand. Antonio raised the prices and Thor made the same profit from half the work.

“It’s so fucked up,” Thor sighed, when he got back from the opening and explained what had happened.

“Imagine if you only finished one a year,” Loki grinned, and Thor laughed and then hummed, half-considering it.

 

When Loki finally felt the urge for employment, he put as little of himself into it as was possible. He recorded audio books in the welcome privacy of a muffled studio, reading words that weren’t his own in a voice that was not the one that whispered in Thor’s ear when they were wrapped up together in bed. He modeled clothes he wouldn’t really wear for fashion magazines he didn’t read and thousands of people paid to look at glossy photos that were of him, but not him, and had required his time only once. He’d left enough of his life on sets and on stages. He was going to save what remained and hope that it could expand and take its own shape without the confines of scripts and studios.

 

“Do you miss any of it?” Thor asked, late one evening when they were tangled up, belly to belly on the sofa in the living room, cocooned in a down comforter swiped from one of the guest beds.

“No,” Loki said, flicking his eyebrows toward his hairline for a split-second, surprised to find it true. “Lately it feels like I’m finding things, not missing them.”

Thor kissed him and went back to to rubbing the crest of Loki’s left hip with the pad of his thumb.

“You’ll tell me if I wear out my welcome?” Loki asked softly, after tallying up the months he’d spent in Thor’s home.

“If that happened I would tell you. But I can tell you now, it won’t.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> please don't comment or repost.


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